Menu

Tag Archives: refugees

What happened in Paris on Friday was absolutely horrific, a crime against humanity, civilisation and practically everything even half-decent that our species represents. No doubt, it will be followed by an “appropriate” response, some curbing of civil rights and some bombs lobbed at the general direction of the Daesh. I would be interested to see if there is anyone who genuinely thinks that this is the right way to go. We have been fighting the War on Terror for 14 years now, by eroding the basic liberties of our populace and bombing shit out of at least a dozen countries and as far as I can see, Salafi-takfiri terrorism has just become immeasurably more popular and powerful. One would think that fighting a war for such long time and seeing your enemy grow stronger would make some folks look for fresh ideas instead of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Protip: are you sure, I mean REALLY sure that Saudi Arabia is a reliable ally that should be showered with weapons and money? Or Turkey? Or the other Gulf States? I mean, we have concrete evidence that they are directly aiding the Daesh, but hey, a friend of a mortal enemy is our closest ally, or so the saying goes.

Though I get it, France was hit hard and now Hollande must pull out his John Thomas and show the world that he is a manly man and he can squirt a steady stream of smart bombs right out of his testicles that will cover the lands between the Mediterranean to Zagros Mountains in mansplosions. I don’t support it, but I understand the basal urges that, for some reason, still dominate political thought, even though certain tropical bird species have managed to evolve more sophisticated displays of dominance. But who are the leaders of the free world to compete against bower birds, they build stuff, that is so girly.

Anyways. This horrific act of terrorism was a very good opportunity for certain leaders of the East-Western World to jump on their hobbyhorse and start spouting their usual anti-refugee hate speech. In case you haven’t been listening to the news in the past months, the refugee crisis still haven’t been resolved. France says that they are completely saturated and can’t take more people, Australia claims that they have no racial problems and they don’t mean to create one, The UK says that accepting refugees might lead to acts of violence against them, Brazil only wants to accept Christians and there is a general fear that the refugees might spread Bolshevik ideas among the populace.

Pardon, wait a minute, I skipped a few decades. Sorry. The above issues were all raised (apart from the Bolshevik one, which was just part of common discourse at the time) at the Evian Conference of 1938, when the West was debating what to do with all the Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi persecution. My bad.

Contemporary politicians are basically saying exactly the same fucking things. I kid you not.

So, it can be said that if you had better things to do than to follow news recently, you haven’t missed a thing.

As a response to the Paris attacks, Mr Orban, the wise leader of the great state of Hungary decided that soldiers and assault-rifle clad police officers should patrol Budapest, because there was a real danger of a terrorist incident. This was, of course, pure theatre. Then, today, he decided to go on the most poisonous tirade heard so far.

He emphasised the possibility of terrorists entering the EU amongst the refugees (as if they really couldn’t enter in about every other possible way imaginable, and I haven’t even mentioned the fact that most of the perpetrators were Europeans so they didn’t exactly had to enter the Union) and said that implanting people from countries against which we are fighting a war (I don’t recall being at war with Syria) is daft. He railed against the “suicidal drives of the intelligentsia” and constantly referred to the refugee crisis as a “mass migration”, a word that invokes images of the barbarian invasion of Rome. (I hope no-one mentioned to him that the Magyars also arrived as part of a mass migration). He said that immigration increases crime, leads to thefts and rapes and destroys cultures and traditions [citation needed]. All he needed was “Would somebody please think of the children” at the end of his speech.

But this are pretty standard lies, just more plainly spoken and concentrated as before. The interesting thing was what happened afterwards. The opposition parties did not even attempt to challenge the dominating discourse. They just tried to chip away at the edges of this ridiculous edifice. LMP said that Diverting the problem was not a solution, Jobbik and KDNP, being fascists, supported the government, and MSZP tried to feebly suggest that we should only blame the terrorists for acts of terror and from this mediocre start, switched to the absolute lunacy of calling for a united European army, intelligence service and border control force.

And that was it, basically. In the Hungarian parliament, there isn’t a single power that dares to actually oppose the government in any substantial way. No-one tried to deconstruct the childish hate speech of the Prime MInister, to use actual facts and statistics to refute his clearly made-up statements and attack his ethno-nationalistic notions of the state, peoples and culture of Hungary.No-one tried to paint refugees as actual people and instead they were making suggestions on how to solve a terrorism problem that Hungary does not have at all. It is not the task of Hungarian opposition MPs to solve the refugee crisis, the war on terror and to make hamburgers fall from the sky to feed the poor. They are given a prime target in the person of a transparently bigoted, corrupt government and it seems that they have no idea what to do with a target. “It is round and has a flat face, maybe it is a table? Or you could try sitting on it. What do you think, would it float? Hmm, I tried throwing it, but it didn’t fly too far. And what are these colourful circles? Dunno, I licked them and they don’t taste nice.”

I am trying to fight against it, but it seems I just have to start every post with a bit of a disclaimer about why I am a horrible blogger. This time, I will make it a whole post.

I started Congress of Baboons to give a highly sarcastic picture of Hungarian politics to people who aren’t necessary Hungarians themselves. I wanted it to be informative, non-partisan and amusing. It is not that easy to balance these three aspects.

I could have drifted towards the informative side, but there are other resources for that, like the brilliant Hungarian Spectrum and I have no wish to compete with them, not that I ever could with my laziness.

The non-partisan thing is of a different matter. I don’t have any allegiances towards any of the political parties in Hungary, as none of them come even close to representing my views. The issue here is that the political spectrum does not exist any more. FIDESZ, even if it lacks an absolute majority in parliament, holds absolute power over the country. The opposition is nowhere to be seen, even Jobbik has been sidelined by the forceful post-fascism of the Orbán Government. MSZP, in its confusion, has basically started to support FIDESZ in its treatment of refugees, and I can’t even remember what the other parties are called. They are gone.

In such an atmosphere, how can one remain non-partisan? I don’t want to write yet another FIDESZ-bashing whine central, because, frankly, the topic is boring as fuck. Yes, we know that they are terrible, it is pretty damn obvious to anyone who is capable of complex thought. They just tried to sneak through a law that would have allowed the secret service to force news organisations to hire their agents. This failed, because unlike most MPs, some journalist actually read the proposed text and now they’ll have to remove it. I am sure they could pass it if they wanted, but since the media is either on their side, or too gutless to actually try to influence public opinion, it really does not matter at all.

And amusing? I can joke around all day, but that doesn’t provide substance.

So here we are, in 2015, and I am not really sure what to write about. So I’ll do a sweeping overview, in bullet points:

The refugee crisis has been diverted towards less functional states. The government openly declared that brown people are not welcome in Europe, because they might change our Christian culture. This, of course, ignores some facts, like how there are currently more refugees in the city of Istanbul than in the EU or that even the whole population of Syria moving over wouldn’t really change the demographics of the Union in any meaningful way. But one shouldn’t let facts get in the way of some good old-fashioned racism. The fences have been built, the thousands of helpless people are diverted further along the borders of the Union, with winter fast approaching. Meanwhile, the EU as an organisation might start working on the Latvian translation of the first preliminary proposals for conducting a study on the viability of setting up a small test-run of the quota system by mid-2018.

It has become clear that outside pressure will not be a factor in Hungarian politics. The EU and the US might make some snide remarks, but as long as international debt obligations are not in danger, Fortress Europe is maintained and there are no attempts to upset any of the Core-dictated other status quos (stati quo? statae quo? I don’t speak any Latin), or start housing Russian or ISIS forces on Hungarian soil, nothing will happen. Stop waiting for it.

On the other hand, the international cabal of Jewish lizard people are also highly unlikely to pounce upon poor little Hungary in order to steal its fertile soils and clear waters. Not that we won’t hear about them every day, increasingly from Government sources.

State funds are being diverted towards shady sources at an ever-increasing pace. Basically, there is now an established pseudo-feudal network of clients that effectively control most of the country, including its agriculture, culture culture, gambling, you name it.

Hungarian society has been more or less tamed. While it has always been as rebellious as a moderately used straw mattress, it remains remarkably content. The vassals are of course happy, the bourgeoisie is content with a favourable income tax and being supplied with ample opportunities for consumption and the poor are either dependent on the vassals for their survival (you just have to fall out of their good graces once, and even your wage slavery is gone and you can join the criminalised sub-underclass). It is all bread and circus, or the threat of taking away what little bread and circus is left.

Public services are collapsing. There is a chronic shortage of workforce practically everywhere. Education is in complete ruins, so is healthcare. The lack of funding for public transportation even made the rabid thug István Tarlós, the mayor of Budapest critical of the Government. Everything is still chugging along, but the wheels can come off at any minute.

At one point, the above two issues will have a major clash. We shall see what will happen then, but I really don’t have high hopes. Still, this is the only hope one can have, because the country has had enough of attempts by “Parties of Moderate Progress Within the Bounds of the Law”.

At least this is not Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey. Many bad things can be said about the Government of Hungary, but at least it isn’t violent or murderous.

This should be it for now. I would love to see some comments on how y’all see the current state of affairs.

Firstly, here’s a public service announcement: Since I am about as bad at regular blogging as your average Hungarian opposition politician is at even perceiving opportunities for efffectively countering the government, I will try out a new plan. I’ll concentrate on regularly updating the Facebook page of this blog and keep up with the occasional longer articles. In case you are interested, you can find the page at the following link

And now, just to be a complete hypocrite, I will now write another post about the Refugee Crisis, because I feel that there is still not enough sources that explain what the hell is going on in an intelligent way.

As you, my dear readers might have realised, the swathe of land that stretches from Western Sahara to the Tribally Administered Regions of Pakistan has been a fan that was not just hit, but so thoroughly inundated with shit that it now bears a striking resemblance to Tony Abbott’s brain. It isn’t really easy to attribute blame or establish a causality of events that led to what is happening now. The War on Terror definitely did not help (unless you are Osama Bin Laden circa 10 September 2001, in which case you’d be overjoyed to see how Neoconservative stupidity paved the way of establishing fundamentalist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East), nor did the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Saudi and Pakistani secret services working together to create the Taliban, using the money of a United States that couldn’t give two fucks about what was happening, as long as the Soviet troops kept on dying. Generally speaking, I have no idea who thought that propping up the theocratic Saudi Arabia would be a good idea and they wouldn’t use their safety to spread their own dangerous version of Islam around the world. Then again, maybe the breaking up of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent wave of colonisation did not help either.

Of course, I do not mean to be partial. No-one forced the mass murdering dictators that popped up after decolonisation to become mass murderers and the jihadis are beyond basic human sanity. There are plenty of locals at fault here as well.

Anyways. Here we are, on 14 September 2015, with a gigantic mess on our hands. Afghanistan is still a failed state, now with tens of thousands of former NATO contractors having been left there to be hunted down and massacred, who would rather stay alive and flee for safety. The only word that can describe Syria is “tragedy”. Assadist forces are fighting the Non-Radical Free Syrian Army with the help of Hizbullah, which is sometimes bombed by Israel even though it is also fighting against ISIS and the post-Al Queda Al Nusra Front, who are fighting the Kurds, who are being viciously assaulted by Turkey (which might cause itself to slide into civil strife), who, along with Saudi Arabia are most probably helping ISIS. Meanwhile, the NATO-trained and armed Iraqi army just packed up and went home.

Millions of Syrian refugees have fled to other parts of their country and about three and a half million are in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. They live in gigantic camps that are kinda run by UNHCR. There is one big issue here: the UNHCR has completely ran out of money. As a UN organisation, it relies on the funds donated by member states, who couldn’t be arsed to contribute enough. Therefore, the refugees, to whom these countries cannot provide even medium-term safety decided that they had to do something.

This is where the EU comes in, it being one of the richest supranational entities in the world. These people, thought that maybe these rich, civilised nations that are always banging on about human rights and such would be able to provide them with asylum. They are kinda right, the EU is able to shelter a lot of refugees. If Lebanon is chugging along with on third over one third of its population being refugees, then the EU should be able to house even the whole population of Syria (theoretically, I might add), which would add a whopping 4% to the total EU population of 507 million.

But the EU does not want refugees. It is in the middle of a partially self-made crisis (which would be worth another full post) and just like any time of economic downturn, it brought the most reprehensible political forces out of the dank subterranean caverns they inhabit. These Nigel Farages and Orban Viktors are very good at making their voices heard, even if they don’t reflect the voices of the populations they claim to represent. But they are not the main issue. The EU Establishment, with Germany at the helm, is fiercely protective of a deeply flawed regulation that is at the heart of the issue: it is called Dublin III.

I am yet to find any explanation about why this horrendous piece of legislation deserves any protection. IT was basically created to make asylum claims clean-cut: you have to request asylum in the state where you entered the EU. Now let’s look at the map. Where are the rich nations? North-Northwest. Where are the poor ones? The South-South-East. If a horrific civil war broke out in Iceland or Greenland, the refugees piling onto boats would have very good chances of finding safe refuge. Coincidentally, Iceland, Canada or Franz Josef Land aren’t exactly at risk of protracted warfare. Which means that should war break out in the South-East, an area known to be, khm, somewhat unstable, nations like Bulgaria, Greece, Hungary or Italy should house all the refugees. What an unfortunate coincidence!

Yeah, right.

None of the South-Eastern nations are really capable of providing asylum to any significant amount of people. They are ravaged by austerity and other forms of capitalist exploitation, their political classes are corrupt and often malicious and their infrastructure is sub-par to say the least. The refugees are simply not granted the rights enshrined by the UN Refugee Convention and no reasonable observer would say that these places are safe for large numbers of refugees.

So, just to recap: We have Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, which are full and where the local governments and the UNHCR are overwhelmed. We have the EU periphery and the Balkan States, which are incapable and unwilling to provide asylum and there is the EU Core that acts welcoming, but is only waiting for its chance to push all the folks back to the periphery. It is worth noting that while Germany seems all cutesy, it is still insisting on Dublin and has a rather bad record of actually granting asylum. Yeah, they’ll welcome the people who make it across their borders (while preparing the paperwork to push them back), but they are also insisting on the periphery governments to stop such things from ever happening.

(But what about the rich Saudi Arabia, why can’t they host refugees? Yeah. Because moving from the pretty laissez-faire, cosmopolitan Syria to the theocratic hellholes where they view non-locals as slaves is an option. Or, as an Afghan refugee, crossing Syria-Islamic State-Iraq is even a possibility. Next please.)

Therefore, FIDESZ is actually right when they claim that they are doing things by the EU book. They are just doing the dirty work of Germany. Not that anyone asked them to make it extra filthy, with the state railways literally scamming refugees by selling expensive tickets to trains that will never take them, with makeshift refugee camps and with the border fence that can only stop local wildlife but not a human being with at least one functioning arm. If a refugee wants to cross a border, then the border will be crossed, no matter how much of the meagre and useless Hungarian police and the even more ridiculously tiny army will want to stop them. Most of the Syrian refugees who made it this far are probably smarter and better educated than the average Hungarian policemen after all. Plus, they kinda want to survive.

And now we get to the other stumbling block. Unless they have a visa, no refugees can enter the EU legally. There is no way for them to do so. They can’t exactly pop in the consulate in Damascus, all them explosions and bullets are way too inconvenient and no airline would take them, as, due to another wonderful piece of EU legislation, the same airline would have to cover for their return ticket should they be refused entry. Therefore, the EU has created a gigantic industry of people smugglers and caused tens of thousands of deaths simply because they conveniently forgot about the fact that refugees should be allowed to enter safe countries. even without papers. Currently in Hungary, we have a situation where an organised syndicate of people smugglers are operating literally metres from the largest concentration of policemen since time immemorial. Sadly, taking refugees, whose “illegal” entry should not be considered illegal as per the aforementioned UN convention into custody is more important than stopping actual crimes.

Then, there are voices sounding the alarm over the death of Christian Europe and an invasion by brown people who will bring Sharia and ban bacon. I think I can fairly confidently state that these voices are stupid and no cultured person should even bother replying to such nonsense. Europe is not Christian and even the whole population of Syria wouldn’t make a dent on continental demographics.

So, how to solve the crisis? It is actually not that hard:

Calm the fuck down

Repeal Dublin and start an aggressive political campaign to convince people that the EU is not only capable, but is obligated to host refugees, whose numbers are relatively small and who can be settled throughout the Union, granted that they have to be treated fairly in all member states.

Create means for refugees to reach the EU safely. Establish processing centres in international air- and seaports and provide transportation. The refugees would actually pay for it most of the times anyway, so it isn’t that much of an investment. This would end people smuggling.

Ignore the Orbáns, the Le Pens and the rest of the xenophobes. They are an issue the EU has to deal with another time. People’s lives are at stake here.

Try to come up with a well thought-out diplomatic solution to the crises, involving almost everyone around. Yes, even Putin and Assad.

Do not bomb anyone.

Seriously, not a single bomb.

Of course, this will no happen. Instead, Germany has now decided that, after eliminating the concept of solidarity from EU common practice through its horrendous treatment of Greece, it will also fuck up one of the main pillars of the Union, the elimination of borders. Other nations are already following suit, and the asshats like Viktor Orbán can feel vindicated and will just be emboldened by such acts. The political forces (the masses, to be honest) on the side of international law and the refugees are providing huge amounts of material and financial aid, but haven’t yet grasped the fact that it is policy that needs to change and that no amount of shoes or sandwiches will solve the causes of the crisis. At least in Hungary, the political opposition is too deeply invested in its unquestioning pro-EU stance to be able to say anything relevant on the matter. I suppose this is true for most of Europe. This is what happens when you only have Liberals to oppose Right-wing policies.

At least now we have a Corbyn on the horizon to show them what real opposition looks like. Reason thunders in its volcano.

“And now the cynical ones say that it all ends the same in the long run
Try telling that to the desperate father who just squeezed the life from his only son
And how it’s only voices in your head and dreams you never dreamt
Try telling him the subtle difference between justice and contempt
Try telling me she isn’t angry with this pitiful discontent
When they flaunt it in your face as you line up for punishment
And then expect you to say thank you straighten up, look proud and pleased
Because you’ve only got the symptoms, you haven’t got the whole disease
Just like a schoolboy, whose head’s like a tin-can
Filled up with dreams then poured down the drain
Try telling that to the boys on both sides, being blown to bits or beaten and maimed
Who takes all the glory and none of the shame”

Elvis Costello – Tramp The Dirt Down

As I write, thousands highly civilised human beings are lying on rags in a pedestrian underpass, trying to get some rest. TIt is a very mixed bunch, a classless society of former doctors, students, teachers, shopkeepers and assholish teenagers who happen to have wound up in the newly renovated labyrinthine underground space near Keleti railway station that made little to no sense up to this point in time, but now it provides shelter for the masses huddled around a transportation hub that provides no transport for them.

Their country, a nation of about 22 million people just ceased to exist. Let that sink in for a while. Imagine if Romania just vanished. Wouldn’t that be weird? I mean, Syria is still there on the maps that are beamed into billions of homes every day in newscasts, you can find it on Google Maps or Wikipedia, but for all intents and purposes, it is as gone as Alderaan. Roughly a third of its population, maybe more, has been internally displaced and millions were forced to leave the country altogether. Its cities are ruined to an extent that hasn’t been seen around these parts since the Second World War. Marauding gangs of mass murderers are fighting for the last scraps of land in a dystopian reality that isn’t that far away. Once the war is over, there might once again be a functional state at the same location, but for now, there is nothing. The people, the best minds off a generation will be far away across the world or under the earth.

This evening I came home from the makeshift refugee camp, dropped my stuff, opened my fridge, got my bottle of chilled water and some fresh fruits and had a bit of a meal for myself. None of these activities would be alien to these folks, but they don’t have homes, fridges or stuff any more. These people are us, Europeans. Well, technically the are not, but let’s not get nitpicky. They are our grandparents who survived the 1940s, spread all over the continents and the world to escape the horrors of their homelands. This experience should not be alien to any European who ever had talks with older family members. Yet, Europe is acting as if this was something new and unusual.

These people walked, sailed and swam through thousands of kilometres, with little to no help, through summers and winters, rain and scorching heat to get to the gates of Europe, a land of plenty, a land of human rights, a civilized land. Had they been rich Westerners with soft drink logos on their shirts, they’d get at least a TV show deal out of their grand adventure from East to West. They could talk about local foods, the landscapes, the parties, the blisters on their foot and the time when they had to get new shoes Fedexed in. But these people, the refugees (not migrants!) see the gates shutting in front of their eyes. Before they can enter, before they can receive any official aid, they have to be processed like complex carbohydrates.

Something went really wrong somewhere. The European Union has always been a bureucratic mess. We all heard stories of regulations governing the curvature of cucumbers and the holes in the cheese. It was still a beautiful mess, founded on the principles of diversity, liberty and justice. But somewhere along the line, amidst the piles and piles of papers, someone could have realised that maybe filling out the proper forms should not be the first priority while other peoples’ daughters are giving birth on the side of the road and other peoples’ sons are willingly submit themselves to be packed into minivans like sardines, hoping that there might be an off chance of them not suffocating in the darkness. Paperwork can wait, paperwork could wait.

Of course, this all has a purpose, for the so-called leaders of Europe, a bunch of wealthy psychopaths so far removed from reality that they can almost hold the hands of the gods they are invoking. I’ve seen the fat frog Viktor Orbán croaking from a podium about the need to protect Europe from the people who need Europe’s protection. I’ve seen him having a penis contest with Donald Tusk over the appropriate Christian attitude. I’ve seen Angela Merkel insisting that the proper procedures should be followed and I’ve seen David Cameron whining from the other side of the continent about how he and his country simply cannot do even a fraction of what the great and powerful nation of Lebanon is contributing. And let’s not even mention the great princes of the Gulf States, with their gold-plated supercars who seem to have forgotten about the whole Ummah thing (unless of course it’s about bankrolling ISIS), or the United States, which seems to be rather OK with keeping that Ocean between itself and the shit it stirred.

These people, all of them, are the scum of the Earth, the lowliest parasites who would sell their own mothers for a half percent gain at the polls. These mighty people are now holding emergency sessions, meetings, press conferences and briefings so that they can skirt around actually doing something. They act out deluded power fantasies, fancying themselves the Defenders of Christian Europe, the Great Humanitarians or the Sole Voice of Reason, strutting around like disgusting, old peacocks in designer suits, too deluded by their own power to actually stand the fuck up and use that power to help the people begging at their doorsteps.

In Europe we have the money, we have the space, we have the means to provide asylum to these tortured people from not that far away. We can do this. The best proof is the outstanding reaction of the populations, who acted faster than their leaders and are pouring tonnes and tonnes of food, blankets, tents, diapers and other everyday items into self-organised collection points, from which they are distributed in an efficient and organised fashion. It is wonderful to see how ordinary people of the Age of Austerity are using their meagre wealth to fuel and run a gigantic logistical operation because there is no-one else to do it and because they are decent fucking human beings. These people are the pride of Europe. These people are the true leaders and these people are the ones who proved that the European Union has failed. It failed its people, whom it should be representing, it failed the refugees whom it should be protecting and it failed its ideals that it should not be forgetting.

These pesky FIDESZ folks, they just can’t give up. I would really like to write about anything but the government, but every other party seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. I have to admit that Egyutt pops up now and again for yet another piece of performance art politics, but I think even they are tired of that shit by now.

FIDESZ is really no fun. They aren’t particularly imaginative and their brand of 19th century rural backwater conservatism is, frankly, tedious as fuck. For instance, there are still echoes of that masterful display of bigotry by Mr Orban I wrote about last time. Klara Ungar, the out lesbian leader of an irrelevant liberal party, as a response to the PM’s remarks, decided to make an attempt at gay-shaming some FIDESZ bigwigs. Don’t ask me what she was thinking, I do not know or understand. One of the “accused” was Mate Kocsis, the mayor of the VIII district, who gained national fame by spearheading the criminalisation of homelessness and who continued his streak of brilliance with his novel approach to tackling drug use, which can be summed up as “Let ’em all get AIDS”. His witty retort was “I am no faggot“, along with a suggestion that Pride should be moved to the parking lot of a wholesale market at the edge of the city. Another ignorant bully, Istvan Tarlos, jumped into the fray and declared that homosexuality is unnatural and he would also like to ban Pride, because its provocative nature does not fit the historical city centre.

I personally am very happy that these fine gentlemen, who no doubt spent countless hours studying zoology, psychology evolutionary biology, anthropology and gender studies and who most definitely aren’t living examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, feel such discomfort at the thought that the arc of the moral universe is bending far away from them, and that in their own lifetimes, they will see their whole hate-filled little world crumble into dust.

And it isn’t all over. Not content with casual homophobia, the government decided to go against another target: refugees. This would have been a perfect occasion to call for a revolution against the European Union, which seems to have decided that the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees does not exist and that one of the most prosperous financial entities in the known Universe simply cannot cope with a fraction of the number of refugees that nations like Lebanon or Pakistan are housing.

Well, it has to be said that it is a bit hard to cope with refugees if, as per the Dublin Agreement, the poorest nations in the Union should be the ones caring for the refugees while the rich, relatively unaffected core are content with whining against their legal obligations to assist people fleeing from hellish conflicts that are, at least partially fuelled by the aforementioned core nations.

I would have been the first person to congratulate Orban Viktor if he stood up and denounced the “only good brown person is the one floating face-down in the Mediterranean” policy, but unfortunately, that did not happen. Instead, the Government started a national consultation.

What is that, you ask? A national consultation is basically an unregulated referendum. The government prints out and mails a questionnaire, which they will evaluate. The best thing about it is that the only authority overseeing the process is the Government itself. If they want to use leading questions, they are free to do so. In fact, the questions were as leading as a badly trained seeing eye golden retriever that spotted an overturned food truck. The results aren’t monitored either, so the government can just declare whatever result they wish.

But it gets way better. Yesterday, an anonymous informant working in a copy shop sent a picture to Index, which was a propaganda poster ordered by the Government. It said, in Hungarian:

If you come to Hungary, you can’t take the jobs from Hungarians

At first, I was sceptical, but then the Government confirmed that yes, this is their work and are proud of it. There will be others as well: “If you come to Hungary, you have to respect our culture” and “If you come to Hungary, you have to respect our laws”. Of course, none of these are in Pashto, Arabic or Tigrinya, hence one can easily guess that the target audience might not be the refugees themselves. Or maybe the marketing company, which is no doubt owned by a friend or relative of a FIDESZ just can’t give two shits as long as the money is flowing.

The campaign is a bit weird in its obfuscating simplicity. It can’t be an effort to turn public opinion against migrants, because Hungarians already despise them. It can’t be aimed at the refugees because they can’t understand a word of it. Itis most probably a show of force, a demonstration of the government’s position, even if it should be pretty damn obvious by now.

And this is the shit I have to deal with. Reflecting on the opinions of gobshites and publicity campaigns on the intellectual level of South Park’s Skeeter:

This is below my level. This is below Hungary’s level. It is even below the level of them arthropods sifting through the muck of brackish puddles. My kingdom for a post-kindergarten political discourse.

I haven’t been writing much, because I haven’t really found anything to write about. I have always taken comedy rather seriously, and I can’t make myself write when I would just be repeating myself. Things are happening, but nothing interesting. A corruption scandal here and there, by-elections, quibbles and other events of no consequence whatsoever. I went to a nurses’ protest a few days back and heard passionate speeches, made to a crowd that was way too small, with lots of shouts of “enough” and “we’re not gonna take it any more”, which sounded just as toothless as the Twisted Sister song. I left when one of the speakers demanded that people give the optional 1% tax donation to the healthcare workers. Now that is a revolution right there. I really hope they know it deep down that appealing for charity is not quite the right way to pressure a government.

Anyways, this is not what I wanted to talk about. Mr Orbán, the ever-more right wing Prime Minister just had a wonderful little public appearance in Debrecen, the second largest city in Hungary and the centre of the impoverished Eastern frontier. He went there for a little propaganda event, to sign an “agreement of cooperation” with the local mayor to develop the city by throwing gazillion Forints at projects that he hopes would keep the city’s voters on his side, at least until the government finally manages to produce a scandal about which Hungarians will finally give a flying fuck.

Debrecen, also hosts one of the main refugee camps in Hungary, and a particularly horrendous one, where thousands of desperate human beings linger for years without hope of legal recognition or treatment worthy of human beings. FIDESZ has been conducting a major hate speech campaign against refugees in migrants in general, in line with the general position of the European Union, which, in order to weasel out of obligations established in a number of UN conventions, decided that there are just way too many refugees and they should be either drowned or kept far away. This is a reasonable request, as a supernational entity,which is one of the biggest economies in the world, with about 500 million inhabitants, cannot be expected to cope with the current amount of asylum seekers. I mean, in 2014, less than half as many people sought asylum in this prosperous, first-world conglomerate as the there are Syrian refugees in Lebanon, an excessively fucked-up nation of 4,4 million people. THE HORROR!

Mr Orbán declared that he wants to close the camp down and send everyone home. This merely goes against the United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, Article 33(1), which prohibits the exact same action, but it’s not like he even gives a damn. I don’t think anyone should believe that he will actually do this blatantly illegal and immoral act, he just needs it to farm more “anti-EU freedom fight” sympathy among the unwashed masses that make up the Hungarian electorate. (Not that a healthy anti-EU freedom fight is a bad thing per se. But let us not kid ourselves, a team composed of the brightest minds of the Orbán government could not spell “exploitative relationship between the EU core and the periphery” if their lives depended on it)

The real gem came later, though, when an Index.hu reporter asked him about the International Day Against Homophobia. I will translate the exchange in full, so that you can savour every last bit of this proud example of bigoted small-mindedness.

-(index) As today is the International Day Against Homophobia, politicians worldwide, including conservatives declared: “Respect to the Gays” and the Government did not make a statement concerning this subject, therefore my question would be that as Prime Minister, what message would you have for the homophobes, and what actions will the Government take to ensure that in Hungary, non-heterosexual couples could hold hands publicly without fear

(wait for it, it is going to be epic)

– (Orbán, visibly annoyed) This is a question which makes one want to joke around, but I would spare us from anything of the sort. So… I would suggest that anyone, who makes public statements about this matter… to do this with reasonable care. Hungary is a serious country. It is fundamentally based on traditional values. Hungary is a tolerant nation. Tolerance does not mean that we would legislate slants of life different from our own as equal. We differentiate between them. Tolerance means patience, tolerance means an ability to coexist, this is the basis of the Hungarian Constitution, it clearly differentiates between a marital relationship between a man and a woman and other, different forms of cohabitation. We are going to keep this. By the way, I am grateful for the Hungarian community of homosexuals that they are not exhibiting the provocative behaviour against which numerous European nations are struggling, and which only results in the exact opposite outcome that they want to achieve. I believe that in Hungary, even though the Constitution clearly differentiates between marriage and other forms of cohabitation, the people with lifestyles different from our own outlook on life are safe, they are given the respect of basic human dignity that they deserve, and I believe that, if I am seeing the commuters of Budapest correctly, foreigners don’t feel that in this respect, Budapest would be a dangerous city. This means that this is good, this is how we can live together. If we steer this system towards any direction, even if we make more stringent regulations or the community of homosexuals start being more provocative, I think that the current peaceful, calm equilibrium will be no more. No-one would benefit from this. Everyone benefits from being able to coexist. I believe that as we are now, we can live together.

Crazy nastyass Orbán don’t care. The reason why I highlighted this astonishingly homophobic tirade, apart from it being a perfect cocktail which mixes the best forms of hate, othering, petite-bourgeois crudeness, ignorance and a sense of superiority, is the honesty. This topic does not come up in Hungarian political discourse too often, and therefore I am sure there was no prepared answer to give. Orbán gave us his opinion, which would have been laughed out of North Carolina, and that is pretty damn pathetic.

All I hope is that the “homosexual community” will break this horrible equilibrium and Orbán will see his precious dream of an oppressive and regressive Hungary crumble in front of his eyes and he will die a broken old man. I’d like to live long enough to savour that when they finally put him in the ground, I’ll stand on his grave and tramp the dirt down.

Now everyone go and watch Pride. It is a gorgeous, wonderful piece of cinema and a perfect palate-clenser after all this hate.